Otherworld Ventures @transdruid - Tumblr Blog

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Intro

My name is Briar (he/it) and this is my spiritual and nature side-blog!

I follow from @sir-alan-of-trebond

I am a Celtic (mainly Welsh) and Greek polytheist, a druid, and an animist.

Sometimes I post my devotional artworks here. Some will be for sale! I also offer tarot, oracle, and ogham readings.

My Divination Readings

My Monthly Tarot Spreads

🦌 - Cernunnos tag

🍇 - Dionysus tag

🕊️ - Aphrodite tag

☀️ - Apollo tag

💤 - Hypnos

🦋 - Thanatos

temperamentalgreen

Trinkets of the Mountain Mother

great-gatsby

every reread kills me a little bit more

great-gatsby

reread and enjoy <3

stonedstonecollecter

Hellenistic Greek Cast Glass Pomegranate Vase

2nd century B.C.E. — 1st century C.E.

cryptic-curation

This sick bleach shirt I made. Something to showcase my undying love for prehistoric cave art.

Some of the bleach burned thru the shirt bc this was my first time bleaching anything ever, but it kinda adds to it.

seabeck

Mud flats and mountains

mxwhore

i love you lab grown diamonds i love you slavery-free chocolate i love you community gardens i love you fact that the insulin patent was sold for $1 i love you locally produced meat and milk i love you streets turned into walkable parks i love you little reminders that Things Do Not Have To Be This Way and there are people working to build a better world!!

aetherograph

i love you smog tests for cars i love you clean air regulations i love you HEPA filters i love you dam removal i love you planting native gardens i love you monarch butterflies (up 64% in 2026!) i love you working for decades to bring the condors back from zero to 300+ in the wild i love you inventing little machines to pick up the plastic fishing nets and other trash in the sea i love you occupational health and safety regulations i love you environmental protection agencies i love you unions i love you social aid programs i love you food not bombs i love you sea shepherds i love you most countries stopping industrial whaling and more humpback whales now than ever before i love you saving the forests i love you little libraries i love you take what you need cupboards/fridges i love you secular food pantries i love you public bathrooms i love you all-ages playgrounds i love you museums i love you aquariums + zoos i love you restoring peregrine falcons to nyc i love you letting beavers fix the river i love you releasing wolves into the wild i love you bison recovery efforts i love you landback i love you reducing light pollution i love you freeway sound baffle walls i love you advertising bans i love you public outreach and education i love you maria montessori i love you queer clinics i love you people working really hard and succeeding at fixing the world and making it safer for all living beings!

genderkoolaid

it is really funny that "Adonis" is used to mean an ideal sexy masculine muscular man, when Adonis in Greek religion & myth was an androgynous young man, known not for his strength but his beauty, who Aphrodite and Persephone essentially had shared romantic/sexual custody over (in an arrangement that interestingly mimics Persephone's own), who "acted as a man with Aphrodite and a woman with Apollon," and the Attic festival in his name (the Adonia) is about Aphrodite mourning his death after he was killed by a boar.

Adonis is a lot more similar to other androgynous "beautiful youths" who die young, representing the Greek fascination with life/beauty and death/aging and the border that a dead youth represents. and it interests me specifically that, in his myth, his divine lover/s are primarily feminized beings, who actively desire and pursue him and have control over his life, and he dies not through being a Brave Manly Warrior but is passively killed. its similar to Ganymede and Hyacinthus, but in both of those stories their divine lovers are masculinized (Zeus and Apollo) and one might think that their androgyny / feminized role in the story is the product of being in a homosexual relationship. but then here we have Adonis, who is said to have "acted as a woman" for Apollo, yet his story is centered around his heterosexual relationship with goddesses and he is still androgynous and narratively passive.

anyways. people hear "epitome of male beauty" & assume that Adonis must represent a modern, Western binary "male beauty" which is just the equivalent of being a handsome, strong, tough man. but ancient Greek culture was full of examples of idealized male warriors, and Adonis was not that. male youth had its own kind of gendered connotation in ancient Greek culture (as did female youth, but that ended much sooner, as adulthood was defined around ability to get pregnant as opposed to civic participation/military service). but (at least in the US) the modern idea of Adonis is so filtered through Western gender norms & Christianity that essentially nothing other than the notion of him being a Hot Guy has gotten through the game of cultural telephone.

dog-rose

Ideas for where to place amulets and sigils for protection.

Doors, door handles, the top of door frames etc. Most effective with guardians and the like.

Hung or tied on gates. Make a warning sign with a sigil or knot magic with ribbons.

Any entrances or exits, including ventilation, drains, holes of any kinds etc.

On window sills. These will catch light - make use of this!

Under lamps and on lampshades.

On shelves and hearths.

In pockets, in wallets, sewn onto clothing. If they are close to you, they will absorb body heat, many in witchcraft charge stones and the like with their own energy, so be wary of this if you have little energy yourself.

On animal collars! As they travel about, they carry protection.

On top of the loo, the sink or tied to the tap or on the shower-head. Be aware that the bathroom is not the cleanest of places and that water can do some damage to things like metals and stones.

Medicine cabinets and cupboards, protecting your medication and food is wise idea, it might be best to avoid strong smells with herbs and spices as this can be absorbed by some food.

The four legs or posts of a bed, I hang charm-bags alternating between sweet smells to help sleep and strong smells to ward things away. Half the battle of warding is feeling secure yourself!

Under your pillow or sewn into a blanket; a blanket or duvet can be a ward itself - as everyone knows, you pull your blanket over yourself as protection as a kid, we use blankets to shield from the cold and the feeling of a blanket weight’s makes you feel secure!

Your computer monitor or laptop, place something on it while it is off.

Bookmarks and bookends can acts as wards, especially in stories that can affect you psychologically it is a good idea to ensure that scenes and images won’t haunt you in your thoughts and dreams.

finalgirldigital

People love natives in such a superficial way. People wanna stand with natives when we’re talking about the trees, and the land. People wanna stand with natives when we talk about philosophies of love and togetherness. But as soon as it’s time to talk about political side of being native. About dismantling a system built on the genocide of our people. About how we need a new system that isn’t built upon capital gain and benefitting white bodies. About putting up a fight. About how the colonial state we reside in is a disgusting imperial plague on this land. Suddenly y’all don’t wanna talk native.

neechees

"They spent hundreds of years trying to assimilate my ancestors, trying to create indians like me, who could blend in, but now they don’t want me either. They can’t make up their minds.

They want buckskin and face paint, drumming, songs in languages they can’t understand recorded for them but with English subtitles, of course. They want educated, well spoken, but not too smart. Christian, well behaved, never question. They want to learn the history of the people, but not the ones that are here now, waving signs in their faces, asking them for clean drinking water, asking them why their women are going missing, asking them why their land is being ruined.

They want fantastical stories of Indians that used to roam this land. They want my culture behind glass in a museum.

But they don’t want me." -Shelby Lisk

directactionforhope

Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't

vasyan-pupkinyan

ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.

how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?

to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.

directactionforhope

I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.

I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)

Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you- even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news... It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin- ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.

directactionforhope

Oh also if any technology did make us human, archeological evidence currently very strongly argues it was when we harnessed fire and invented cooking.

Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.

Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially

Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is

Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain. Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.

-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.

Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:

Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions. August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.

The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process. By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164. Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.

Or, less scholarly:

It takes a lot of calories to power a human brain. Find out how cooking and gut microbes help us make the most of our food.

reasonsforhope

Humans are not defined by our capacity for violence.

Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.

By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.

By our millennia-long quest to make our lives, and the lives of those we love, more and more into something we can live